


i saw you in the wild (you were nervous, you were furious, you were very sure-footed)

by diasterisms



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-10 00:37:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5562041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diasterisms/pseuds/diasterisms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This isn't fighting anymore; it's muscle memory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i saw you in the wild (you were nervous, you were furious, you were very sure-footed)

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [Tumblr](http://kylorenvevo.tumblr.com/post/136002161281/i-saw-you-in-the-wild-you-were-nervous-you-were). All new planets mine.

i.

You learn a man best by fighting him. Rey knows every muscle of Kylo Ren’s body by now, his weak spots, his tells, especially when unmasked— the odd flicker in his eyes when he’s about to feint, usually to the left, and the little breath he puffs through his mouth when he’s getting winded. She knows that he has a temper, and that he lacks the focus needed for long, drawn-out battles.

By contrast, Rey is patient, a trait carried over from trawling the shifting sands for scraps she can sell, from meticulously scrubbing grime off star destroyer relics, from waiting for a family that never came back. She takes the time to inspect her opponent, to figure out what buttons to press and what habits to exploit.

That’s how Kylo Ren becomes real to her, his mannerisms and vulnerabilities falling together like puzzle pieces until he becomes more than a murderer, more than the right hand of the enemy. Bit by bit, the _human_ emerges as they cross blades countless times over the course of the war, slipping into each other’s mindset as easily as donning second skins, matching each other’s rhythm in a graceful, deadly choreography of red and blue light.

_This isn’t fighting anymore._ The strange thought occurs to her one day, when she dodges his blow and he automatically waltzes out of her counter’s reach. _It’s muscle memory._

ii.

The bridge is long and narrow, chiseled out of silvery quartz centuries ago by some extinct civilization that had once thrived on the volcanic planet of Eydas Neen. Contrary to her usual practice, Rey is taking a leaf out of Kylo Ren’s book and trying to wrap up this duel as quickly as she can, because the heat from the lava pit is getting to her as it boils and shifts in ribbons of bright crimson and molten gold beneath their feet.

He’s sacrificing more ground than expected at this stage of the match, his movements sloppy and just the slightest bit delayed— as if he’s having to actually _think_ about them. She wonders what’s going on under that mask— it can’t be the heat alone, surely? They’ve fought in far more extreme conditions before, in icy chasms and fire-razed forests and pounding rain. His shoulders aren’t all tensed up either, which means that he’s not yet exhausted.

And then she realizes something— in her haste to end this skirmish, she’s striking _hard,_ forcing him to block with both hands wrapped around his lightsaber’s hilt, and she’s moving too fast to give him time to revert to his usual one-handed grip. He can’t use telekinetic shoves and pulls, can’t immobilize her with a mere stretch of black-gloved fingers. Lacking the opportunity to launch Force-based attacks, Kylo Ren does _not_ know how to fight.

Interesting.

Their blades clash again; her eyes water at the sudden flare of red and blue sparks. Now that the suspicion has taken root, now that she knows what signs to look for, she notices that his defensive stance is off— there’s not enough bend to the elbows, and too much strain on the wrists as he pits his weight against her.

“You never finished lightsaber training,” Rey blurts out.

The mask stares at her, reflecting the beams of the kyber crystals and the glow of the lava pit, a stain of colors, blurring on black. “Of course not,” he replies in that cold, artificial voice. “There was no one left to teach me.”

_Yes, that’s right,_ she thinks, cobbling together the memories she’d seen in his mind and the history she’d learned from Luke Skywalker. An immense being such as Snoke has no need for melee weapons, and, though the Knights of Ren may spar with one another until their blood coats the ground, only the failed Jedi of Kylo’s rebellion use lightsabers— and they are none of them masters of the art, not like Luke.

“You pity me,” her foe observes. Is she imagining it, the hint of surprise, the revulsion? “I see it written all over your face.”

“It’s not pity, it’s regret,” she snarls, teeth bared. “What you could have become—”

She pushes against him and springs backwards, breaking their lock. And then, without missing a beat, she’s on the offensive once more, whirl of blades, two pairs of feet moving in precise counterpoint to the other over a crystalline bridge, in a cavernous realm of fire and rock. He slips on a glossy plane in the rough-hewn quartz, lands flat on his back, and then the beam of her lightsaber is a hair’s breadth from the side of his neck as his own weapon rolls out of reach.

She towers over him, panting, sweat dripping into her eyes, the lava pit below echoing the infernal rage in her own soul. Yes, she can kill him now, like this, leave the First Order reeling from the loss of one of their finest generals. She’d be doing the Resistance a favor, she’d be _avenging_ Han Solo—

“Do it, Rey,” murmurs Kylo Ren. She hates that mask, how it conceals his expressive face, how she can’t tell whether the note in his voice is eagerness or resignation. “Give in.”

It tugs at her, the darkness. Her arm moves—

_— away—_

She lashes out with the Force, sends him flying. His head knocks against the cavern wall and he slumps to the ground, unconscious. She turns on her heel and races for the exit, hurling herself forward through veils of heat and shadow, gaze fixed on the end of the tunnel, a circle of beckoning daylight.

iii.

It’s called Niman, the form that he prefers. The stance clearly shines through one afternoon on the jungle moon of Sentinel, when he’s deflecting Finn’s blaster fire, blade swinging upwards, off-hand folded across the chest as he continues to advance. Niman, as Rey has learned from Luke, encourages its adherents to incorporate Force powers into combat— a fitting style for one whose bladework is average, but who can freeze an energy bolt in mid-air.

“Get back to the ship,” Rey tells Finn. “I’ll hold him off.”

The Resistance lieutenant chuckles. “All right, but don’t take too long. We’re on a tight schedule.”

Rey shakes her head even as she bites back an answering smile. Sometimes she still has difficulty reconciling this confident officer with the same boy who was running scared on Jakku. _“Go,_ Finn.”

He retreats, crashing through the undergrowth, and she focuses her attention on Kylo Ren, her lightsaber humming as it ignites. They circle each other warily in the shade of dark green leaves and tangled branches, the charged silence between them interspersed with distant, muffled explosions as Poe Dameron’s starfighter takes out the First Order droidekas.

With the effortlessness of routine, Rey sinks into her preferred opening stance— left foot braced forward, right arm pulled back, the blade angled parallel to her left arm, which raises the off-hand in challenge.

“You lead with Soresu, always, but you use Ataru techniques once you have the advantage,” he remarks, in what for him passes as a conversational tone. “I recommend that you specialize. Ataru would suit you best.”

The _arrogance_ of this man. Her irritation is eclipsed only by her surprise that he has noticed this peculiarity of hers— but, of course he would, did she think that she was the only one assessing and measuring, all these years? Behind the fathomless eyes of that mask, he has been watching her, too.

“You speak from a veritable wealth of experience, I presume,” she scoffs, injecting just enough contempt to remind him of their last encounter on Eydas Neen, and what they had talked about.

He shrugs off the barb. “I’d hate to see your potential wasted because you couldn’t make up your mind. Stick to one form, or become master of none.”

She blinks. “That sounds like something Luke would—”

“Yes, I heard it the moment I said it,” he unexpectedly grumbles, as if he’s annoyed with himself.

To her horror, Rey feels a genuine laugh rise in her chest, but she chokes it down. To punish him for slipping past her defenses, she resurrects an old ghost. “Your grandfather, though, was a Form V specialist—”

Kylo Ren whips out his off-hand too quickly for her to block the telekinesis. She’s lifted off her feet, sent sailing towards him, right into the waiting edge of his blade—

Rey grits her teeth against the pull, angles her hips just so, and kicks him square in the chest. The red beam slices her thigh at the same time that her lightsaber glances off his arm. They send each other sprawling to the damp, mossy earth, both of them marked by the other, both of them hissing in pain.

She’s already preparing herself for the next bout; however, it seems like he has other plans in mind, because he tilts his head as if in response to some invisible call.

“We’re done for today,” he announces curtly, extinguishing his weapon. “I am required elsewhere by the Supreme Leader.”

She blinks. “Well, you didn’t have to explain that to _me.”_

“You’re right.” The mask is impassive as always, but she can sense his bewildered frown. “I didn’t have to.”

*

Finn and Poe both do a double take when she limps into the medbay on the Resistance starship that flies them out of Sentinel.

“Don’t tell me Ren was actually able to cut you!” Finn exclaims in dismay, halted in the act of wrapping a bandage around Poe’s hand— a rudimentary procedure that highlights the fact that they’re running low on tech and supplies.

“I was goading him,” Rey admits, easing herself onto the cot beside Poe, who obediently shifts aside to make room for her. “I got a bit too carried away being a smartass to pay attention to my immediate circumstances.”

“In other words, you pulled a Dameron,” Finn deadpans.

She sighs. “I pulled a Dameron.”

“Hello?” Poe waves his uninjured hand. “I’m right here.”

“We know,” Finn and Rey chorus.

The pilot makes a face, but steers the conversation back to the original topic. “I do believe, Madame Jedi, that this is the first mark Ren has scored on you in months.”

“All streaks come to an end,” Rey mutters.

“You know, I’ll almost be sorry when you finally get around to killing him,” Finn muses. “It’s the most entertaining part of my day, watching you beat the crap out of Darth Vader 2.0.”

“Remember back when the three of us were so scared to let one another out of sight?” Rey demands. “We hated it when any of us had to go on dangerous missions or fight without the other two. We were all so— _jumpy._ What on earth happened?”

“War happened, sweetheart. We’re all a bit jaded now— a little bit crazy,” drawls Poe. He grins at Finn and Rey, bedroom eyes, bandaged hand, and all. “At this point, I figure that we just simply owe it to one another to stay alive.”

iv.

Kylo Ren wears his mask to battle eighty percent of the time, but, in Rey’s dreams, his face is always bare— the way it was that first engagement in the snow, desperation blazing in his eyes, dark blood streaming down his pale features. Her slumbering mind picks out scenes from her memories, turns them over and over with a scavenger’s careful consideration, imbues them with the surreal haze of the stray thoughts that she ignores when awake.

— In the wildflower fields of Thelanni, their lightsaber beams slanting under the bluest of skies, his sharp profile against the white glare of the sun, oddly young and blurring at the edges, a boy about to disappear—

— His body pressing into hers, long and lean, her back to the cool metal wall of a grounded Resistance star destroyer that’s already half-collapsed beneath a TIE fighter bombing run, his head bowed almost into the curve of her neck, and he smells like smoke and rain—

— On Gnisis Oad, a Mid Rim world shrouded in perpetual twilight, where they are nothing more than star-dusted wraiths to each other, and he ducks to avoid her swing and, for a moment, just for a moment, his black hair whispers against her knuckles, unsettles her with the softness—

She often wakes up still fighting him, the gasp of her lips forming the shape of his name. She often has to resist the temptation to close her eyes and return to those misty realms where he is neither dream nor nightmare, neither friend nor enemy— just— _hers._

v.

Finn has his hands on his hips, surveying with satisfaction the ebbing tide of Stormtroopers as they retreat across the dunes of Nasur. Rey’s standing beside him, scanning the horizon for… something.

Poe bounds up to them from the wreckage of his latest crash landing and snaps Finn a jaunty yet sincere salute. “Glorious infantry charge, lieutenant general!”

“That was a hell of a dogfight, ace,” Finn returns.

Arm in arm, the two men start walking back to base, only to stop in their tracks when they realize that Rey hasn’t moved from her spot.

“Party’s over, Madame Jedi,” Poe cheerfully calls out. “Time to put our feet up.”

Rey almost tells them to hang on, because— any moment now— a tall, black-clad figure will come striding over the sands with that hunched, predatory gait and stain her skin in red light. But nothing happens. The battle has ended, and Kylo Ren hasn’t appeared.

There’s a hollow pang in the pit of her stomach— a pang that takes her a few stunned seconds to identify as disappointment.

Maybe Poe was right. Maybe she really _is_ going crazy.

vi.

Two months pass before she sees him again.

On the watery planet of Lahara, a city made of pale green glass is slowly sinking beneath towering pillars of cold, dark waves. A storm is tearing the midnight skies apart with streaks of lightning and bursts of rain. Both sides— the Resistance and the First Order— are hurrying to evacuate their armies, when, somewhere in the midst of all that frantic scramble, a familiar flash of red catches Rey’s eye.

She doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t think, operates on pure instinct alone. The disappointment back on the scorched desert of Nasur has been given ample time to simmer into something fiercer, hotter— something that rips loose from her throat in a garbled cry as she races towards him on the seesawing glass platform while the icy wind howls in her ears.

He turns, attuned as always to her presence. He’s not wearing the mask— she leaps, and the moment seems to go on forever, his brown eyes widening, reflecting the blue gleam of her blade, his hand rising in Force-shove—

She won’t _let_ him. Her left hand lets go of the lightsaber’s hilt and she shoves _back,_ sweeping him into a nearby huddle of Stormtroopers. Once he disentangles himself, she’s already holding her weapon vertical in a two-handed high guard, statue-still even though the platform is rocking and shuddering in the onslaught of the hurricane-tossed ocean.

“Dare I hope that you took my advice on specializing in Ataru?” His tone is calm even as he observes her opening stance with something like pleasure.

She cocks her head. “Come and find out.”

He slides into a two-handed guard as well, except that this one is low, lightsaber hilt to waist, blade angled downwards, feet closely spaced. There’s a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth— she gets the ridiculous feeling that he’s glad to see her, although she can’t imagine why.

She attacks first, descends on him in a maelstrom of acrobatic spins and fast, furious strikes. She’s angry that he made her wait, angry that _she_ waited, angry that the two of them have let it— whatever it is— go this far.   

_Control, control,_ she chants to herself as they put each other through their paces. Her rage must neither blind her into making mistakes nor push her over the abyss to be consumed by the Dark Side. She checks the flow of emotion, reels it in. That is something he has rarely been able to do.

Soon they’re practically the only ones left, most of their respective troops having been airlifted to safety. They have to hold the center of the platform as best as they can to avoid slipping down the sides and falling into the ocean, so, despite all the open space, this turns out to be their closest-quarter fight yet. Red lightsaber shrieks against blue as black waves come crashing down, and sometimes his hard thigh brushes over hers, and sometimes it’s chest to chest, and sometimes his hand skims the small of her back, and sometimes her fingers dance along the inside of his wrist.

Muscle memory.

Rey isn’t sure how it happens— she’s in that adrenaline-fueled, trance-like state that elicits seamless action ungoverned by analytical thought— but, in the end, the rain has slowed to a soft drizzle, the ocean has gentled its tosses and turns, and she and Kylo Ren are standing in front of each other in what must have started out as a series of parries or a burst of opposing footwork, but is now a motionless impasse, the two of them soaked to the bone and panting heavily, their blades held away to the sides by outstretched arms. Her body is folded into the lanky planes and steel ridges of his, and she’s staring, unseeing, at the vast expanse of rolling water to her right. His heart beats against her cheek in violent staccato, and, yes, she knows all these sinews— this warm and unyielding frame— as well as she knows the back of her hand.

She knows the back of _his_ hand, too, there’s a scar there and it’s from her, they’ve bruised and marked each other plenty over the years.

He bows his head so that his lips trace the words into her temple. “I am always fighting you, even in my dreams,” he rasps in a tense, strangled voice. “I fear that I will always be fighting you, and we will never be finished with this.”

Someone has to step away first. She figures that it might as well be her.

*

Rey hauls herself into the cockpit of the _Millennium Falcon,_ her mouth tasting like salt and things left unsaid. Right before takeoff, she glances out the window and sees Kylo Ren’s lone silhouette walking towards his command shuttle, as, all around him, a city of glass continues to disappear into the waves.

**Author's Note:**

> [Kylo Ren using Niman on Takodana](http://kylorenvevo.tumblr.com/post/135741157576/kylorenvevo-okay-but-thats-a-fucking-perfect)
> 
>  
> 
> [Soresu opening stance](http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/e/e1/Luminara_TCW.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/180?cb=20090310213227&format=webp)
> 
>  
> 
> [Ataru high-guard stance](http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111029135545/theclonewiki/images/9/98/Mistress_Secura.png)
> 
>  
> 
> [Niman low-guard stance](http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/0/07/Form6Niman-SWGTCG.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110901004651)


End file.
